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Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Vatican City, 12 March 2014 (VIS) –
Tomorrow, 13 March, will be the first anniversary of the election of
Pope Francis to the See of St. Peter. These 365 days of his papacy
have been characterised as a “time of mercy”, as described by the
Pope himself. During these twelve months of intense activity, the
Pope “from the end of the earth” who asks us to pray for him, has
started out on a new way of working that, with a slow but sure pace,
has drawn renewed attention to issues not only of an ecclesiastical
nature. The “priest of the world”, as his special secretary Msgr.
Alfred Xuereb calls him, “has not wasted a minute! He works
tirelessly and, when he feels the need to take a moment's pause, he
closes his eyes and does nothing: he simply sits and prays the
Rosary”.

To commemorate this first anniversary,
the director of the Holy See Press Office, Fr. Federico Lombardi,
S.J., gave an interview with Vatican Radio in which he reflects on
this year and its “great impulse to a journeying Church”.

“The most important aspect of this
first year is without doubt the great attention, the great attraction
of the people – I say the people, meaning not only practising
Catholics, but everyone in this world – the great attention for
this Pope, for his message. It is something that I think and hope is
very deeply rooted in the heart of the people, who have felt touched
by a word of love, attention, mercy, closeness, proximity, in which
through the man, the Pope, the love of God arrives”.

“The Church truly seems to be a
journeying people. This is her most characteristic aspect: a sense of
great dynamism. The Pope has given a great impulse and journeys with
a Church that seeks God's will, that seeks her mission in today's
world for the good of all, truly going out to the peripheries, to the
ends of the world”, he continues, adding that there are
“manifestations of attention, therefore, that come from places,
from atypical organs of the press”, that “mean that his message
reaches its target”.